I’d love to see an independent dive into consciousness & moral patienthood.
Luke Muehlhauser did a thorough report (a) on this a couple years ago. As far as I know, that work is informing a lot of EA prioritization. It’s quite opinionated, and I haven’t seen too much discussion of its conclusions (there’s some in the AMA; the topic definitely warrants more).
Consciousness and its relationship to morality is complicated enough & important enough that an independent pass seems high value.
Potential entry point: Integrated Information Theory is currently pretty prominent in neuroscience; I’d love to see an EA steelman of it. (Luke on IIT, after giving a brief explainer: “let me jump straight to my reservations about IIT.”)
While the purpose was to investigate invertebrate sentience, they also covered different species of vertebrates, plants and single-celled organisms for comparison.
I guess I’m desiring more of a common vocabulary here, maybe something like “here are some open questions about consciousness that are cruxy, here’s where [our organization] ended up on each of those questions, here are some things that could change our mind.”
Luke did a good job of this in his report. From a quick look at Rethink Priorities’ consciousness stuff, I’m not sure what they concluded about the important open questions. (e.g. Where do they land on IIT? Where do they land on panpsychism? What premises would I have to hold to agree with their conclusions?)
I should probably only speak for myself and not the entire team, but I think the breakdown is something like:
Where do they land on IIT?
Quite skeptical / lean against
~
Where do they land on panpsychism?
Quite skeptical / lean against
~
What premises would I have to hold to agree with their conclusions?
The key assumptions are:
(1) epiphenomenalism (in the traditional sense) is false
(2) methodological naturalism
(3) “inference to the best explanation” is a worthwhile method in this case
~
here are some open questions about consciousness that are cruxy, here’s where [our organization] ended up on each of those questions, here are some things that could change our mind
We largely chose not to do this because we mostly just agree with what Luke wrote and didn’t think we would be able to meaningfully improve upon it.
Thanks for highlighting; I had only thought a little about RP’s work on consciousness. I’ll take a closer look. (This essay seems especially relevant.)
Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi (the main advocate of IIT) and others had an interesting exchange on IIT which goes into the details more than Muehlhauser’s report does. (Some of it is cited and discussed in the footnotes of Muehlhauser’s report, so you may well be aware of it already.) Here, here and here.
I ended up looking at some theories of consciousness and wrote Physical theories of consciousness reduce to panpsychism. Brian Tomasik has also of course written plenty about panpsychism, and I reference some of his writing.
I’d love to see an independent dive into consciousness & moral patienthood.
Luke Muehlhauser did a thorough report (a) on this a couple years ago. As far as I know, that work is informing a lot of EA prioritization. It’s quite opinionated, and I haven’t seen too much discussion of its conclusions (there’s some in the AMA; the topic definitely warrants more).
Consciousness and its relationship to morality is complicated enough & important enough that an independent pass seems high value.
Potential entry point: Integrated Information Theory is currently pretty prominent in neuroscience; I’d love to see an EA steelman of it. (Luke on IIT, after giving a brief explainer: “let me jump straight to my reservations about IIT.”)
Also would be great to see an EA steelman of panpsychism, which is considered plausible by a bunch of philosophers and some scientists.
Have you seen Rethink Priorities work on this? https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/invertebrate-sentience-table
While the purpose was to investigate invertebrate sentience, they also covered different species of vertebrates, plants and single-celled organisms for comparison.
I guess I’m desiring more of a common vocabulary here, maybe something like “here are some open questions about consciousness that are cruxy, here’s where [our organization] ended up on each of those questions, here are some things that could change our mind.”
Luke did a good job of this in his report. From a quick look at Rethink Priorities’ consciousness stuff, I’m not sure what they concluded about the important open questions. (e.g. Where do they land on IIT? Where do they land on panpsychism? What premises would I have to hold to agree with their conclusions?)
I should probably only speak for myself and not the entire team, but I think the breakdown is something like:
Quite skeptical / lean against
~
Quite skeptical / lean against
~
The key assumptions are:
(1) epiphenomenalism (in the traditional sense) is false
(2) methodological naturalism
(3) “inference to the best explanation” is a worthwhile method in this case
~
We largely chose not to do this because we mostly just agree with what Luke wrote and didn’t think we would be able to meaningfully improve upon it.
Thanks!
fwiw I found your comment really helpful & I think the RP content would benefit from including a sketch like this.
Thanks for highlighting; I had only thought a little about RP’s work on consciousness. I’ll take a closer look. (This essay seems especially relevant.)
Yeah, I’d recommend reading that essay, the feature reports, and also the cause profile.
Got it, thanks!
Scott Aaronson and Giulio Tononi (the main advocate of IIT) and others had an interesting exchange on IIT which goes into the details more than Muehlhauser’s report does. (Some of it is cited and discussed in the footnotes of Muehlhauser’s report, so you may well be aware of it already.) Here, here and here.
I ended up looking at some theories of consciousness and wrote Physical theories of consciousness reduce to panpsychism. Brian Tomasik has also of course written plenty about panpsychism, and I reference some of his writing.
Thank you for doing this! I was excited to see your piece, and have been thinking about it.